JAMI ATTENBERG
Jami Attenberg has written four novels: The Kept Man, The Melting Season, The Middlesteins, and, most recently, Saint Mazie. The Middlesteins was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. Attenberg has written essays about television, sex, technology, and other topics, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, and other publications. Most of the characters in her remarkable story collection, Instant Love, are in search of love and life, and one of them is an avid reader of science fiction.
“In the Bushes” is a story of the demise of the automobile. It was commissioned for 2033: The Future of Misbehavior, an anthology of stories assembled by the editors of Nerve.com.
We met in the bushes. That’s where everyone goes nowadays to get their fun on around here, ever since we had to give up the cars. We did it without a fight, because there wasn’t much oil left to put in them. The president decided to start a bunch of wars (Q: How many wars can you start at once? A: Four.), and he asked us to donate our cars so we could build weapons, and we all said, “Sure, wasn’t like we were using them anyway.” And just like that, it became illegal to have a car. They throw people in jails now just for possession of a hunk of metal. So now we walk everywhere, or ride our bikes (the bikes weren’t worth their time), and when we want to make out in the backseats of cars, we just use the bushes instead.
I wasn’t making out that night. My girl had left me to get married to a soldier who was going off to war. (The one in India, I think.) “No offense,” she said. “Benefits.” She had met him at one of the barn social nights held just for those purposes—for young women to meet soldiers. I did not know she had been attending them. But marrying a soldier was your best bet for a good life. I could not hold it against her. We had just graduated from high school. I had nothing to give her but a ride on the back of my bicycle.
Although it is a smooth ride.
I was taking the dog for a walk instead, but we were lured by the bushes, the sounds and the smells, the kisses and the moans. Everyone was so happy and free. The air smelled so fresh and green and sexy.
This is what they do now. They start at one end of town at sunset, and, one by one, the kids show up and make the march to the park. By night, the streets are full of kids walking and talking, sharing whatever news they heard their parents whispering about that day. A good piece of dirt can get you laid before dusk breaks. (Not that they’re in any hurry: Curfews disappeared with the cars. How far could anyone get? What kind of trouble could they find on their feet?) And then there they are, at last, at the park, in the dark. Kids fall in love in the bushes, babies are made, mosquitoes bite.
Sometimes I miss oil.
They gather near a patch of American elms—that’s where it shifts. Maybe they’re thinking about how they’re doing their part for our country, our great nation. They swig booze from paper bags, shift from foot to foot. And then they pair off, eventually, wander away from the elms, closer to the bushes, pointing at a constellation, or lying down and hoping for shooting stars. A shooting star guarantees that first kiss. After the first kiss, it’s just a short walk to the bushes that spiral up every year higher to the sky.
They’ve been calling it the Rustle lately.
Not everyone hangs out in the bushes. Some kids like to pair up on a Friday and pick the dirt weed on the back roads. (That stuff was never strong enough to smoke until a few years ago—there was a shift in the air after the explosion in Council Bluffs, and now what looks harmless can send you flying for two days straight.) On Saturdays, the town council hosts a bonfire at the church (mostly old auto magazines); there’s romance in roasting marshmallows while erasing the past. And of course there’s the equestrians—they’re all over the roads. Those girls sure do love their horses; they never seem to want to get off them.
And then there’s me. I just like to walk, and watch everyone. When I met her, we were just tracing a little path, me and the dog. I had a stick I was dragging along, and he would stop me every few yards and dig into the ground. She was coming up toward us, a huddle, in the darkness, of sweaters and a sturdy coat and a gigantic backpack. We stopped as we approached and stood in front of each other, and just then a girl let out a loud and very final-sounding moan from the bushes, and the leaves rustled.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m lost.” She didn’t look scared at all, though maybe she should have been, wandering around in the middle of nowhere near all those squirming bodies in the bushes.
“Where are you trying to go?” I said, though I had a pretty good idea.
“I heard there was a place for people like me around here,” she said. She shifted her backpack up on her back, and she lifted her head up and the moon and the stars hit her face, and I could see that her skin was clear and her eyes were dark and focused and determined, and then she smiled—not warily, but aware nonetheless. There was a sliver of space between her two front teeth. I wanted to insert my tongue between the space and let it lie there for a while and see what it felt like. The dog liked her, too. He sniffed at her feet and then rested at them.
She was making her way to Los Angeles, she told me. We’d seen a few of her kind passing through before. Los Angeles had seceded from the Union a while back, when the first rumblings of the car reclamation had started. They had fought the hardest out of anywhere. They loved their cars the most. And we had all heard stories of a city trapped in gridlock, but people were still migrating there from all over the country. To a place that still moved.
It was a real shame about Detroit, what happened there.
“You’re a ways away from the shelter,” I told her, but I said I’d walk her in the right direction. It was a nice night. From the bushes we heard two voices jumble together in laughter, and then a guy said, “I love you.” I offered to carry her bag for her, and she judged it, judged me, and then handed it over.
As we walked she told me about life back East. Her husky voice perfectly matched the sound of the crunch of gravel under our feet. She had taken hold of my walking stick and dragged it behind her. She was from Philadelphia, and, like every other city out there, there weren’t too many trees left, let alone bushes. There were lines every night at the few public parks that remained, and the government charged admission. A fee to flirt. If you couldn’t afford that, it was all alleyways for you.
She said she got sick of the feel of cold cement against her ass.
“I know I shouldn’t complain,” she said. “I know how lucky I am, how lucky we all are. We live in the safest place in the world.”
She talked about how much she still loved her hometown, the kind of fun she had there. Young people had taken over downtown Philly with graffiti. When the trees went away, the kids began to paint new ones. People now met and fell in love over a can of paint; five-story marriage proposals covered abandoned buildings. They were calling it a cultural renaissance.
“But I just wanted to see what it was like,” she said. She threw her arms up toward the sky and all around. “Out there.” She stopped and touched me, turned me toward her. “Not that I care about the 152 cars so much. Although I guess I do care. What they mean, what they meant. But I just wanted to be somewhere new.”
And then, because I wanted to impress her because she had impressed me with her ache and desire and energy, even though I didn’t know her at all, even though she could have been lying about who she was and why she was there, even though I might never see her again, even though she was tired and dirty and she smelled of the earth (or maybe because of it), even though I could have been trading in my freedom, I said to her, “Do you want to see something really cool?”
We shifted direction toward my home. She dug the trail behind us with the stick, like we were Hansel and Gretel. We made it home quickly; we were both excited. I dropped her bag on the front porch, took the dog off the leash, and let him run around in circles in the backyard. We walked toward the small island of trees and bushes behind my house. The dog barked, nervous, but I ignored him. I held her hand and cleared us a path through the bushes until we came upon it.
A 2017 Chevy. The roof was missing, and the leather had been beat down by the rain and snow. Everything else was rusted. But still we slid in the backseat immediately.
She started to cry, but I think maybe she was laughing, too.
“It’s just a useless piece of junk,” I said. “It’s not that special.”
“No, it’s really nice,” she said.
I put my arm around her, and we slouched down in the seats and looked up at the sky. “There should be a radio playing,” she said. “Classic rock.” So I sang, my voice echoing in the trees. I sang her every song I remembered, and then, when I was done with those, I made up a few new ones just for her.